Why Companies Should Automate Financial Planning

The larger an organization, the greater the need for better financial planning and analysis (FP&A). You’re dealing with massive amounts of data, and you’re often under intense pressure to provide timely insights.

Any delays or mistakes in financial planning could have catastrophic consequences. Many companies today are struggling to meet these expectations in their financial planning process.

“When you talk to folks that are involved in planning processes, they say, ‘It’s just too slow,'” Planful CEO Grant Halloran says. “For a lot of the folks that we work with, an annual planning cycle might take four or five months, and that’s just outrageous in this dynamic business world that we operate in.”

You can mitigate many of the challenges in this business process by automating repetitive financial planning tasks. Financial professionals see reduced errors, shorter cycle times, and increased productivity by switching to automation, allowing them to shift their focus to higher-priority work.

Maintain data quality as the company scales

When a company scales, it often has more data to deal with from multiple business divisions.

Excel may have been enough in the past, but at this point, it’s hard for large organizations to maintain data quality and accuracy using spreadsheets. In general, spreadsheets are error-prone, and the traditional copy-and-paste approach to data leaves plenty of room for errors. Automated data collection software eliminates recurring data entry and can reduce the risk of human error.

Finance is an area of business where you’re dealing with data on a day-to-day basis, and if you choose to automate financial planning, you’ll simplify much of the work.

“The organizations that wait to automate their financial processes will find it hard to grow and scale their business,” says Licia Salice-Jarisch, SVP of Finance at Binary Fountain. “Finding ways to seamlessly integrate new technology that blends well with your existing business diagnostics and general financial system is key.”

The ideal functions suited for financial planning automation are repetitive and rule-based. You might use automation to automatically extract accounts receivable data and feed it into your forecasting system for the financial consolidation process and reconciliation process, saving hours of finance teams’ time and minimizing errors.

Planful is a powerful solution that can automate financial planning. Access reliable data and avoid versioning issues that come with multiple reports. Our platform gives you the familiarity of Excel but reduces the risk of copy and paste errors.

Protect your finance team’s time

Finance teams that rely on spreadsheets spend much of their time each month collecting information from various sources, aggregating data, and manually inputting this information.

You can save your finance team hours spent on this labor-intensive, repetitive work by switching to a solution that supports data integration and automates data collection and aggregation.

According to Gartner, “robotic process automation can save finance departments 25,000 hours of avoidable work annually,” which is equal to the cost of $878,000 for companies with 40 full-time accounting staff. Moreover, Accenture found that “a successful RPA implementation” can reduce processing costs by 40% to 80% and processing time by up to 80%. “Robotic process automation can save finance departments 25,000 hours of avoidable work annually.”

Planful works with over 200 pre-built connectors, on-premise and cloud-based ERP systems, data warehouses, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. You don’t have to deal with data silos anymore.

You can view all business data from a single source of truth and collaborate easily with other teams, saving hours of your team’s time that might have otherwise been spent on manually gathering and inputting information.

Provide quick forecasts for better decisions

Timeliness is critical in financial forecasts. You need to quickly identify opportunities and risks as the market changes so you can pivot if necessary.

Spreadsheet-based financial planning makes it challenging to create these immediate forecasts because they involve so much manual input.

“Forecasting well and forecasting quickly are often linked. Those who can do it quickly are most likely capitalizing on available technology and can produce mini-forecasts on demand,” says Perry D. Wiggins, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at CFO.com. “The power of analytics, enabled by automation, makes it easy.”

Forecasting well and forecasting quickly are often linked. Those who can do it quickly are most likely capitalizing on available technology and are able to produce mini-forecasts on demand. With a powerful FP&A platform like Planful supporting your finance processes, you can reduce the time spent on mundane tasks, freeing up time to analyze and be more accurate in your forecasts.

Planful automatically provides suggested forecasts based on a variety of drivers so you can assess the impact of key decisions in real-time.

Automate financial planning so your team can focus on what matters

Contrary to popular belief, automation doesn’t eliminate the need for human involvement in financial planning. By freeing up employees’ time, without compromising data accuracy or productivity, automation allows finance teams to shift focus to the big picture: from historical reporting to future-looking analytics for dynamic, continuous planning.

Get a demo of Planful today to learn how you can automate your team’s financial planning process.